Presents the best of recent feminist scholarship on the suffrage movement, illustrating its complexity, richness and diversity.

Much has been written about the men of Wakefield, but apart from a couple of well-documented individuals, the women of Wakefield have remained largely ignored. Yet many women in this prosperous West Riding town worked hard to improve their lives and those of other women. Whether this was healthcare, housing, working conditions or providing refuge and training so that girls with no means of support could be made fit for employment, Wakefield’s women worked separately and together to achieve their mutual goals. Some were active campaigners and lobbyists, others chose vocations that quietly improved the lives of the women around them. Struggle and Suffrage in Wakefield uses historical newspaper articles, minutes of meetings, annual reports, first-hand stories and research into census returns to illustrate how women’s lives changed over a 100 year period and reveal some of those Wakefield women whose influence made things happen.

Struggle and Suffrage in Nottingham is the story of many women across the generations and their struggle for equality. This was not just a struggle for the vote but also for equality in the workplace and even in their own homes. Women gave a great deal to this country and still do. This book is a celebration of just some of those women whose stories as a whole are too many to tell. We owe our privileges today to those many women who struggled for the freedoms we are allowed to take for granted today. The centenary that is the subject of this book covers two world wars where women took on men’s jobs, with many sacrificing their lives along the way. These women suffered humiliation and force feeding in their quest for the vote and yet continued working towards their dream. This is the first book to concentrate solely on this period in women’s history in our county and shows the struggle women endured at a time when equality was rare among men as well. A woman’s job was seen to be purely looking after the house and raising children. Many men felt threatened by any woman who wanted more. Using many primary sources, including minutes of Nottingham women’s many social groups, this book tells of the women of Nottingham and their work, until now largely hidden behind the prominent men of Nottingham and its county. It tells of their welfare work, their war work, their political efforts and the hardships endured in their own homes. Included are the stories of Helen Watts, suffragette; Lady Laura Ridding, wife of the Bishop of Southwell; Lady Maud Rolleston, who followed her husband to the Boer War; as well as ordinary women undertaking war work, some of whom were Canary Girls in the munitions factories who lost their lives in an explosion in 1918. Nottingham is a city known for its rebellious acts, this centenary in women’s history was no different. This book is merely a place to start when looking at this period in our local history. It cannot cover but a small amount of the work carried out in our city by innumerable women over the centuries.

Marking the centenary of female suffrage, this definitive history charts women's fight for the vote through the lives of those who took part, in a timely celebration of an extraordinary struggle An Observer Pick of 2018 A Telegraph Book of 2018 A New Statesman Book of 2018 Between the death of Queen Victoria and the outbreak of the First World War, while the patriarchs of the Liberal and Tory parties vied for supremacy in parliament, the campaign for women's suffrage was fought with great flair and imagination in the public arena. Led by Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters Christabel and Sylvia, the suffragettes and their actions would come to define protest movements for generations to come. From their marches on Parliament and 10 Downing Street, to the selling of their paper, Votes for Women, through to the more militant activities of the Women's Social and Political Union, whose slogan 'Deeds Not Words!' resided over bombed pillar-boxes, acts of arson and the slashing of great works of art, the women who participated in the movement endured police brutality, assault, imprisonment and force-feeding, all in the relentless pursuit of one goal: the right to vote. A hundred years on, Diane Atkinson celebrates the lives of the women who answered the call to 'Rise Up'; a richly diverse group that spanned the divides of class and country, women of all ages who were determined to fight for what had been so long denied. Actresses to mill-workers, teachers to doctors, seamstresses to scientists, clerks, boot-makers and sweated workers, Irish, Welsh, Scottish and English; a wealth of women's lives are brought together for the first time, in this meticulously researched, vividly rendered and truly defining biography of a movement.

The road to suffrage for the women of Leatherhead was often bumpy and unwelcomed by men and women alike. The Women’s Suffrage Caravan rolled into Leatherhead on Saturday, 16 May 1908, its presence inciting riots amongst many of the menfolk. The town’s Unionist Club in December 1908 passed the motion that it was ‘unpropitious’ for legislation on the question of women’s suffrage and yet, from behind the closed door of her home in Belmont Road, women’s rights campaigner Marie Stopes had begun to pen Married Love; suffrage campaigner Dame Millicent Fawcett would fascinate her audience at Victoria Hall in 1910; and Emmeline Pankhurst’s arrest and detention at Leatherhead police station would capture the interest of the nation, placing Leatherhead centre stage of the push towards revolution in women’s rights.By the arrival of the First World War, middle-class girls were not allowed out without a chaperone, few married women had a job and no woman was allowed the vote. It was the general view that politics and work were only suitable for men. By the arrival of the Second World War Leatherhead’s women were still expected to live up to the typical housewife persona, where their main role in life was to bring up the children and do the housework. The husband was usually the head of the house, and his word was law to both his children and his wife, the one expected to look after the children.Using numerous primary sources, this fully illustrated book tells the story of numerous famous and ordinary women who lived and visited Leatherhead between 1850 and 1950; Ella Neate, born into a family of local grocers, who discovered a talent for operetta; Pearl Kew, one of the first women in the town to own a car, enabling her to drive to work as a teacher in Guildford; the charity work of Cherkley Court’s Letitia Dixon; Emily Moore the Swan Innkeeper, these many more fascinating stories of local women whose lives have hidden in the shadows of Leatherhead’s menfolk.

This book brings together twelve chapters from feminist historians from around the world to offer new perspectives on aspects of the campaign for women’s suffrage in Britain. Although the focus is on Britain, this volume signals how the women’s suffrage campaign in Britain embraced both national and global aspects. The historical developments and structures that affected women’s lives and suffrage struggles were not limited to national contexts. Early chapters focus on particular individuals both well and lesser known, including Millicent Garrett Fawcett and Emmeline Pankhurst, as well as Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy, Princess Sophia Duleep Singh, Lady Isabel Margesson and Isabella Ford. Later chapters highlight the interrelationship between the British movement and suffrage campaigns across the globe with reference to Austria, Japan, New Zealand, Australia and the USA. The chapters deal with issues around strategies, social class, employment, religion, nationalism, empire and race and explore complex issues about women’s roles in campaigning for their democratic right to the parliamentary vote. Offering the reader a broad view of the British women’s suffrage movement, this is the ideal volume for students of women’s and political history in both its national and international contexts.